Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.
Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.
Where the old game had one benchmark scene, the new game has three different scenes with different requirements: Spine of the Mountain (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Geothermal Valley (3-Mountain) - and we test all three (and yes, I need to relabel them - I got them wrong when I set up the tests). These are three scenes designed to be taken from the game, but it has been noted that scenes like 2-Prophet shown in the benchmark can be the most CPU limited elements of that entire level, and the scene shown is only a small portion of that level. Because of this, we report the results for each scene on each graphics card separately.
Graphics options for RoTR are similar to other games in this type, offering some presets or allowing the user to configure texture quality, anisotropic filter levels, shadow quality, soft shadows, occlusion, depth of field, tessellation, reflections, foliage, bloom, and features like PureHair which updates on TressFX in the previous game.
Again, we test at 1920x1080 and 4K using our native 4K displays. At 1080p we run the High preset, while at 4K we use the Medium preset which still takes a sizable hit in frame rate.
It is worth noting that RoTR is a little different to our other benchmarks in that it keeps its graphics settings in the registry rather than a standard ini file, and unlike the previous TR game the benchmark cannot be called from the command-line. Nonetheless we scripted around these issues to automate the benchmark four times and parse the results. From the frame time data, we report the averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
#1 Geothermal Valley Spine of the Mountain
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
#2 Prophet’s Tomb
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
#3 Spine of the Mountain Geothermal Valley
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
104 Comments
View All Comments
MrSpadge - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
It's definitely good that reviewers test the game mode and the others, so that we know what to expect from them. If they only tested creator mode the internets would be full of people shouting foul play to bash AMD.deathBOB - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Ian - why not just enable NUMA and leave SMT on?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The fourth corner of testing :)lelitu - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Looking at setting up something for a home VM host, and linux development workstation makes NUMA with SMT the most useful set of benchmarks for my usecase.I'm particularly interested in TR, because it's brought the price of entry low enough that I can actually consider building such a system.
Ratman6161 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
ThreadRipper is big bucks for your purposes if I'm reading this correctly. For a home lab sort of environment a lot of cores helps as does a lot of RAM, but you don't necessarily need a boatload of CPU power. For example, in my home ESXi system I've got an FX8350 which VMWare sees as an 8 Core CPU. I've also given it 32 GB of DDR3 RAM (purchased when that was cheap). The 990FX motherboards work great for this since they have plenty of PCIe lanes available. In my case, those are used for an ancient ATI video card I happened to have in a drawer, an LSI x8 RAID card and an x4 Intel dual port gigabit NIC. The RAID card has 4 1 TB desktop drives hooked up to it in a RAID 5.All of the above can be had pretty cheap these days. I'm thinking of upgrading my storage to 4x2 TB SAS drives - available for $35 each on Amazon...brand new (but old models). The system is running 6 to 7 VM's (Windows Servers mostly) at any given time. But with only two users, I don't run into many cases where more than two VM's are actually doing anything at the same time. Example: Web server and SQL Server serving up a web app.
For this environment, having a storage setup where the VM's are not contending for the disks and also having plenty of RAM seems to make a lot more difference than the CPU.
Of course if you have the bucks and just want to, ThreadRipper would be terrific for this - just way to expensive and overkill for me.
lelitu - Monday, August 21, 2017 - link
That depends a lot on what you want the VMs for. Unfortunately for the sort of performance testing and development I do a VM toaster isn't actually good enough. Each VM needs at least 4 uncontended cores, and 10GB uncontended RAM. Two VMs is the absolute minimum, 3 would be better.That's not going to fit into anything less than a ryzen 7 minimum, and a Threadripper, *if* it performs as I expect in SMT + NUMA mode would be almost perfect. Unfortunately, you're right, it's a *lot* of coin to drop on something I don't know will actually do what I need well enough.
Thus, I wish there were SMT+NUMA workstation and VM benchmarks here.
JasonMZW20 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Seems like Game Mode should have bumped up the base clocks to 1800X levels, especially for Nvidia cards using a software scheduler that seems to scale with CPU frequency. AMD's hardware scheduler is apparent in overall FPS stability and being mostly CPU agnostic.Matching base clocks with 1800X or even 1900X (3.8GHz) might be better on TR for gaming in Game Mode.
lordken - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Also for some weird reason that 1800X is much faster with higher fps in civilization and tomb rider?peevee - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores. "Sorry, but when 12 cores with twice memory bandwidth are compiling slower than 8, you are doing something wrong. Yes, Anandtech, you. I'd seriously investigate. For example, the maximum number of threads were set at 24 or something.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
When you have a bank of cores that communicate with each other, and replace it with more cores but uneven communication latencies, it is a difference and it can affect code paths.